Speakeys is a tiny dictation app for your Mac. Tap a key, speak, and your words appear wherever your cursor is, in any app.
Try it: press and hold the orb, or hold Space.
Speakeys stays out of your way as a small orb in the corner of your screen. It comes alive only when you call it.
Click into any text field, then tap the key once. The orb wakes up, glows and starts listening.
Your words appear live in a small bubble beside the orb. The orb moves with your voice.
When you go quiet for about two seconds, Speakeys types the text at your cursor and the orb goes back to rest.
Mail, Slack, Notes, your browser, even the terminal. Your clipboard is put back afterwards.
See exactly what's being heard while you speak, before anything is typed.
Right ⌘, ⌥, ⌃, ⇧ or Fn, or record any combo like ⌃⌥Space or an F-key.
The orb breathes softly at rest and never reacts to the room. It only comes alive when you call it.
Starts with your Mac and lives in the menu bar. Sounds, size and position are all up to you.
About 0.3% CPU at rest, with the orb drawn on the GPU. No dependencies, MIT licensed.
Speakeys uses Apple's built-in speech recognition and runs it on-device whenever your Mac supports it.
Yes. Speakeys is free and open source under the MIT License.
A Mac running macOS 13 Ventura or later.
It works the same way, but you can see what's being heard as you speak, pick your own shortcut, and switch between tap and hold. It also puts your clipboard back and stays quietly out of the way.
Speakeys needs the Accessibility permission to type. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility and turn on Speakeys, then restart it. Until then, Speakeys copies the text so you can paste it with ⌘V.
App Store apps can't type into other apps or listen for a shortcut from anywhere, and those are Speakeys' core features. So it's distributed directly instead.
Speakeys for macOS is coming soon as a signed download. Until then, you can build it from source in under a minute.